Sunday, August 23, 2009

Our team of bloggers had a very mixed day at the Laser World Championships in Canada on Saturday.

Best performance of the team came from Australian blogger Ashley Brunning who was charging to new heights. His dramatic account of the first race of the day tells us how he "exploded out to leeward of the fleet", "hiked like a demon to cross the fleet", and "made a huge gain downwind." He crossed the finish line 50 meters ahead of his nearest rival to score his first ever Laser World Championship win. Well done Ash!

In between races he munched on bananas and blueberry bread and then sailed another excellent race for a 4th place finish. Maybe if he had stuck to the Clif Bars from Day 2 he would have won the second race too?

In any case, Ashley's results were good enough to pull him up to 6th place overall, and tied on points with two other guys for 4th. Wow! These bloggers are getting damn good.

Dominican blogger Raul Aguayo tells us in AHI VIENE BILL! how he achieved two more solid finishes, but unfortunately not quite good enough to make the cut for the gold fleet. However Raul is still pleased with his progress and looking forward to some close competitive racing in the silver fleet.

American blogger Clay Johnson had the most disappointing day of all the members of Team Blogger, a Crazy Day Three indeed. He arrived at the yacht club on Saturday morning to discover that some members of his Blue fleet had filed for redress for the race committee's failure to abandon Friday's sole qualifying race, in which Clay came third. (I am assuming that the redress request was based on the foggy conditions.) The protest committee agreed that the Blue fleet race was indeed an unfair test of skill and called for it to be resailed on Saturday. In the resail Clay was black flagged so his score for the race went from 3 to BFD!

And then to make things worse Clay chose what turned out to be the wrong side of the first beat in the next race and scored a 32nd. He did a lot better in the final race with a 6th place but with only one discard allowed at this stage he has slipped a long way down the rankings.

After three tough races, finding his way back to the club in fog, helping to pack all the Lasers away in the clubhouse in preparation for the arrival of Hurricane Bill, Clay and a few other bluefleeters filed for redress for the decision to throw out Friday's race. But then the protest committee refused to hear their protest because they were five minutes late turning in the form!

Geeze, what a day! Clay admits to being "really upset" but is trying to put what happened behind him and have a good Gold series.

Wait a minute. We haven't heard lately from Team Blogger member Colin Cheng. Has anyone seen him?

Oh there he is with the SIN letters on his sail. What the hell are you doing here Colin?

3 comments:

We have Mark Bethwaite here this week. He was clinicing (yeah, I verbed it, so what?) this week in the gorge (heard they had forty kts of wind on Saturday while we were sailing in perfect dinghy conditions on Yale Lake) and he'll be at the club tonight sailing with our Monday night Laser sailors.

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